Cracow Indological Studies (CIS) founded in 1995 by Marzenna Czerniak-Drożdżowicz, Iwona Milewska, Lidia Sudyka and Cezary Galewicz is an open-access periodical currently edited at the Department of Languages and Cultures of India and South Asia (Institute of Oriental Studies, Jagiellonian University, Cracow). The CIS volumes are published twice a year in English, covering various areas and contexts of South Asian studies ranging from purely literary issues to those present in texts in different Indian languages contributing to the history, philosophy, aesthetics, art and religion of the Indian Subcontinent, with the main focus on India.
This article explores the cultural and literary significance of Calligonum polygonoides, locally known as phog, an endemic shrub of Rajasthan’s Thar Desert. The subject of analysis is the poem, Phog ikīsī, by a contemporary Rajasthani poet Girdhardān Ratnū (b. 1970), which serves as a lens to examine the broader cultural landscapes of Rajasthan. The poem bridges tradition and modernity, employing the literary form of Marwari known as Dingal. Through a close reading of this work, the article reveals the enduring connection between people and their environment, highlighting the ecological and cultural consciousness embedded in local literary traditions. Ultimately, the analysis argues that Phog ikīsī expresses a profound sense of Rajasthani identity (Rajasthani-ness) and affirms the value of locality.
Copyright (c) 2025 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article considers the relationships between poetry, comportment, and performativity in early-19th century Rajput courts. I argue that in their historical and textual representations, court intellectuals fashioned kings’ poetic bodies, which coded their behaviour through literary conventions—drawn from Sanskrit and Hindi poetics and more local traditions of Rajasthan—and modelled refined, aesthetically nuanced dispositions for later rulers. I foreground these intellectuals’ interest in pleasure and play, and underline the significance of sexuality and embodiment in their accounts. My focus is on the Jayavaṁśa mahākāvya, which narrates the lives, reigns, and passions of the rulers of Amer-Jaipur. The text was first written in Sanskrit, and then re-interpreted in Hindi prose, and I suggest this vernacular interpretation speaks to an evolving understanding of kingship in the colonial period.
This paper looks at the performativity of Rajput kingship, taking up the case study of the Rathor house of Kishangarh. Studying historical cases of legitimation and illegitimation from the first half of the 18th century, it argues that affect and emotions played an important role in the process. Specifically, different players challenged and asserted power positions through multi-medial mobilization of “myth” integrated with evocation of different moods against the background of sacred time and space. In this process, gender played an important role, as female divinities and palace women were involved both as objects in the males’ royal displays, but also with room for an agency of their own.
This article explores Shivaji’s use of Braj Bhasha poetry to construct and assert his identity in the furtherance of his royal consecration and realisation of his geopolitical ambitions. Departing from the cultural environment of Deccani sultanates with their established patronage of Dakani and Persian, Shivaji employed Braj to appeal to Hindu aristocracy, most notably Rajput chiefs, linking himself genealogically to the Sisodia Rajputs. Śivrājbhūṣaṇ, poetical treatise commissioned by him, blends indigenous Hindu themes with Persianate royal imagery, reflecting complex political and cultural strategy to claim legitimacy and imperial status. Drawing on Dirk Kolff’s hypothesis on warrior identities (1990), the article attempts to consider Shivaji’s Rajput affiliation as both pragmatic and indicative of flexible social identities shaped by military alliances. The study situates one of Shivaji’s literary and political endeavours within a broader tradition of Braj Bhasha literary cultivation in the Deccan, tracing its origins to Shivaji’s father, Shahaji, and poets such as Cintāmaṇi Tripāṭhī. This transregional literary engagement reinforced Shivaji’s royal authority and positioned him within the competing cultural landscapes of early modern India.
The Portrayal of Maharaja Jaswant Singh I and his Philosophical Activities in the Posterior Literary and Historical Sources
In the geopolitical landscape of the 17th-century North India, Jaswant Singh I of Marwar (r. 1638–1678) was an influent political figure, close to the imperial Mughal court. Viewed from the cultural perspective, he was well-known as the author of scholarly works on Vedānta, the aspect of his intellectual activity understudied to this day. Current paper intends to examine how his philosophical and intellectual endeavors were portrayed in the later dynastic sources. With this in mind, I first consider the portrayal of Jaswant Singh in the Sūraj prakās, text composed by Kaviyā Karṇīdān, the court poet of Maharaja Abhai Singh Rathor (r. 1724–49). Thereafter, I analyse one of the poems on the royal lineage from among those penned by the Nāths during the reign of Maharaja Man Singh Rathor (r. 1803–43). My investigation suggests that rather than transmitting a univocal image of Jaswant Singh as the protector of a well-defined Hindu dharma, the philosophical and religious elements in Jaswant Singh’s later portrayals respond to the diverse agendas of their authors, bringing to light multiple historical representations of the Rajput ruler.
This essay examines the tales (kathās) of the Kyāmkhānī poet, Jān Kavi (fl. 1614–1664) in order to explore the historical process through which a Rajput great tradition took shape in Mughal times. Firmly situated within the genre conventions of earlier Sufi love tales that emerged from the Avadh region, the Mughal-era Braj Bhasha kathās present an archetype of the emperor-minister ideal in imaginary narratives, juxtaposing it with historical accounts rooted in Islamicate and Mughal-Rajput models. The tales illustrate how, during the centralization of power under the Mughal emperor and the allied Rajput kings, the fraught Rajput world is idealized, and infused with a heightened sense of self and honour. By situating the Kyāmkhānīs within the Mughal state and the kathās within their genre conventions, Jān Kavi articulates the ethics of loyalty, service, and kinship in an upwardly mobile ruling family.
The Paradigm of Light in the Hindu-Muslim Religious Culture of Rajasthan
Nizārī Ismailism was a major strand in the fluid religious culture of Rajasthan and its periphery. D. S. Khan (1997) submitted the hypothesis that it also helped shape sects of nirguṇa bhakti, such as the Dādūpanth, which emerged as late as the 16th century. The article tests the case of this sect by a textual study focusing on the paradigm of light in the thought of Dādū and his disciples and related to the same paradigm elsewhere in the regional religious landscape. Dādū’s bhakti beyond the Hindu-Muslim divide was characterized by the impulse it received from Sufism, conspicuously at a time when Nizārī Ismailism itself had been impacted by this for about three centuries.
Studies in Literary and Cultural Landscapes of Rajasthan
There is no abstract for this article.
Poetry on Combat for Secularism and Democracy
The tragic events that followed the demolition of Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992 in Ayodhya were the culmination of a conflict simmering for almost the entire period of independent India, especially after the 1980s, striking at democracy and secularism, two values on which independent India was built. The Hindi literary world did not remain silent to these developments. However, the literary output that emerged on the subject during this time, though largely known and studied from the perspective of communal conflict and politics, has not been explored in the context of bearing witness by the literary community—their specific gaze as a witness. This article attempts to fill this gap by looking at two poetry collections, Apnī zabān, and Yah aisā samay hai, edited by Asad Zaidī and Viṣṇu Nāgar, and published by SAHMAT in 1994. It offers a contextualised analysis of the creative expression offered by poets acting in defence of a democratic, secular state.
Copyright (c) 2025 Danuta Stasik https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Indigenous People, Environmental Issues and a Reinterpretation of the Indian Epic Tradition in the Bengali Short Story A Bird’s Mother (Pākhir Mā) by Sunil Gangopadhyay
This paper deals with the Bengali short story A Bird’s Mother (Pākhir Mā) by Sunil Gangopadhyay (1934–2012). First published in 1964, the story must have been inspired by the recent mass attacks on the indigenous Lodha ethnic group in the Midnapore district of West Bengal and P. K. Bhowmick’s seminal book The Lodhas of West Bengal: A Socio-Economic Study (1963), as well as news about the degradation of Midnapore’s sal forests and the declining numbers of Siberian cranes wintering in India. Combining social and environmental concerns, the story shows how complex interactions between wildlife, indigenous people and agricultural communities can lead to conflict and aggression. The paper analyses the story in detail, focusing on the strategies used by the author to explain attitudes towards indigenous people in rural India. The paper also suggests that the story may be read as a modern reinterpretation of the krauñca-vadha episode from the Rāmāyaṇa.
Copyright (c) 2025 Anna Trynkowska https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Hermina Cielas Leão https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Rural Violence and Warfare in Medieval South India
This paper explores the problem of rural violence in medieval South India through a study of hero-stones collected from the districts of lower Karnataka between the 9th and 13th centuries. These documents reveal a world of everyday violence in which the countryside emerges as a space of potentially open-ended belligerence, and the peasant an armed agent. Furthermore, hero-stone inscriptions suggest that localized rural violence was continuous with, and only partly distinct from, what historians often characterized separately as ‘state violence,’ and in fact existed in a heuristically ‘intermediate realm,’ a point that has serious implications for understanding the nature of state, society and conflict in medieval South India more generally.
Copyright (c) 2025 Daud Ali https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2025 Monika Browarczyk, Martin Hříbek, Lidia Sudyka https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Adivasi or tribal communities in contemporary India are no strangers to violence. The incidence of violence within the tribal world requiresa multifaceted analysis. While much of the contemporary violence arises out of contestations over resources, it may also arise from other factors like social prejudice. This paper proposes a typology of violence encountered in the world of Adivasis through the history of the Lodha community in the Indian state of West Bengal. Categorized as Criminal Tribe in 1916 during British colonial rule, Lodhas were vilified and victimized both by the colonial government and by the rural society at large. After Independence, the Criminal Tribes Act was repealed in 1952, and Lodhas were denominated as the Denotified Tribes or vimukta jāti. This did not, however, ameliorate their social marginalization or their material status and Lodhas continued to live a life of abject poverty even under progressive governments. Finally, the paper looks at the steps taken by the Lodha community to combat such stigmatization in recent years.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sanjukta Das Gupta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Śurpaṇakhā from the Rāmāyaṇa, though she plays a pivotal role in the epic, is often neglected in the main discourse. The character’s exclusion from the central narrative typically positions her as the “other” and reduces her to a flat, villainous archetype. To bring her from the margins to the center, it is crucial to reimagine and reinterpret her narrative in order to reclaim her subjectivity. Thus, this paper proposes revising Śurpaṇakhā in Poile Sengupta’s play, Thus Spake Shoorpanakha, So Said Shakuni, through the lens of the rasa-bhāva theory. It moves beyond the aesthetics to view rasa as a transformative medium, shaping the character’s experiences. It investigates the factors that marginalize Śurpaṇakhā in the traditional narrative and how they instigate dominant sthāyibhāvas like śoka (grief) and krodha (anger), which, respectively, evoke karuṇa rasa and raudra rasa, shaping the character’s internal conflicts and agency. By redefining her emotional complexity, this study challenges traditional Rāmāyaṇa narratives and offers new perspectives on the emotional experience of marginalized voices.
A decades long attempt by the central government to control dissent in Punjab culminated in a military operation codenamed Bluestar (June 1984). Overtly aimed at flushing militants from the Golden Temple, it led to the desecration of the sacred place by the army and an unwarranted bloodshed, soon to be followed by the assassination of Indira Gandhi (31 October 1984), anti-Sikh riots, an unprecedented growth of militancy in Punjab and division of Punjabi society along religious lines. Punjabi literature addressed the matter, trying to make sense of the traumatic event and its aftermath. Dalip Kaur Tiwana (1935–2020), too, provided, by way of her novel, Jimī ̃ puchai āsmān / The Earth Asks the Sky (1986), a fictionalised witness account informed by her experience as university teacher whose students find themselves drawn into the vortex of political exigencies. A study of her reflections on dissent and violence in this context will constitute the subject matter of this paper.
Copyright (c) 2025 Maria Puri https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
To date generations of people from South Asia grapple with traumatic experiences of havoc and violence prior to, during and in the aftermath of the Partition of British India. Writings in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi, and English, i.e. in languages spoken in the regions mostly affected by the turmoil of 1947, reflect the painful process of coming to terms with these experiences and of possible reconciliation with consequences of “the long shadow of partition” (Bhutalia 2015). Violence against women, often gruesome and unspeakable, was a facet of the Partition that occurred repeatedly but whose testimony and records were either censored and/or silenced by survivors and newly established states for diverse individual, communal and “nation-building” reasons (Bhutalia 1998). In my paper I would like to examine how Hindi novels dating from the end of the 1950s to 2016 narrate instances of partition violence against women. With focus on Yashpal’s Jhūṭ hā sac of 1958, Bhishm Sahni’s Tamas of 1974 and Krishna Sobti’s Gujrāt pākistān se gujrāt hindustān tak of 2016 I scrutinize various
Copyright (c) 2025 Monika Browarczyk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Violence in Modern Indian Thought in the Mirror of World War II
The turmoil at the end of the long 19th century and the aftermath of the World War I inspired many Indian political thinkers to reflect upon violence as a means of attaining statehood. Revolutionary violence brought about abrupt social transformation in Russia, while the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian Empire enabled the formation of several new states. Meanwhile, Germany, the other major European power, was reduced to shambles. The contradictory possibilities which the above developments proffered to the cause of India’s independence shaped Indian debates on violence during the interwar period, finding their most acute expression in references to the emerging developments of the World War II. Focusing on Indian responses to the violence of the World War II, this paper analyses writings of some nationalist figures—primarily Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Aurobindo Ghosh, and Madhav Sadashivrao Golwalkar—to examine how different philosophies such as non-violence, revolutionary struggle, and Hindu nationalism intersected with European wartime developments. These perspectives are framed as tensions between spiritual morality and pragmatic realpolitik.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martin Hříbek https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The article examines narratives on domestic violence in middle-class families in selected novels of an acclaimed Indian author, Bani Basu, who writes in Bengali. Svetpātharer thālā (1990) and Khārāp chele (2002), set in the second half of the 20th century in Kolkata, provide meticulous depictions of the patriarchal system in an urban middle-class society that is modern and conservative at the same time. The analysis suggests that Basu follows relatively conventional narrative patterns while portraying women experiencing domestic violence, namely showing their journey from submissive wives—psychologically manipulated by their husbands, their in-laws and the society at large—to self-confident agents of change who fight for their freedom and happiness, paying a heavy price for their acts of rebellion.
Copyright (c) 2025 Weronika Rokicka https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
No abstract is avaliable for this article.
In the Mahābhārata (MBh), whipping is mainly resorted to by charioteers while driving their horses and the terms designating whips are therefore frequently found in the war-books. Used metaphorically, the expression “whip-like words” designates cutting, hurtful speech. Excessive whipping of draught-animals is considered cruel and is seen as a sign of low birth. When humans are whipped, this is regarded as particularly insulting, since such treatment is usually reserved for animals, but the outcome for the offenders is unequal: kings who whip brahmins are swiftly punished and cursed, whereas brahmins who flog kings get away with it scot-free. Such tales are most frequently found in the MBh’s Anuśāsanaparvan, where they serve to underscore the brahmins’ superiority.
Copyright (c) 2024 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Jaimini’s Book of the Horse Sacrifice (Jaiminīya Āśvamēdhikaparvan) is a late mediaeval Vaiṣṇava text that is unusual for several reasons. In this article we examine the interplay of violence, devotion and ritual in the Sanskrit vorlage and its Kannada transfiguration—the Jaiminibhārata of Lakṣmīśa (ca. 1500 CE). Violent emotions or extreme feelings are deeply imbricated in South Asia religious discourse. Extreme feeling is entangled with the history of texts that emerged as a result of interreligious and intra- religious debate. Our article puts forth the idea of violence as a mode of bhakti devotion, and we historicize the emergence of violence-as-bhakti in the Vaiṣṇava context, using the tale of Mayūradhvaja from Jaimini’s Book.
In the paper, I examine the concept of “cruelty” (kaṭumai) of physical substances in the Tamil siddha alchemical literature, by taking as the starting point an analysis of the selected texts ascribed to Siddhar Yākōpu alias Rāmatēvar (ca. 17th–18th c.), a prominent author of the Tamil siddha alchemical tradition. The alchemical works of Yākōpu repeatedly describe certain alchemical operations, the names of which allude to acts of violence, such as “binding” (kaṭṭutal) and “killing” (kollutal). Such operations, according to the texts, should be mastered and performed by alchemists on various material substances. In the paper, I analyze passages that shed light on the purpose and character of such operations in the alchemical tradition of the Siddhars. I also address the issue of the non-human material agency related to the perspective of material ecocriticism as presented in the Tamil siddha texts.
In a recent study (Pontillo 2016) it has been argued that the Mahābhārata contains traces of a heterodox culture, the Vrātya-culture, and these emerge most clearly in connection with Bhīṣma and Droṇa. In this article it will be strongly suggested that any analysis of these two epic characters should take Kṛpa into account as well, since he has many features in common with them, especially with Droṇa. Furthermore, after a briefly outlined proposal to explain these commonalities, the function of the narrative character of Kṛpa will be examined.
Among the extensive repertoire of Pāṇḍya dynastic themes, the motif of clash between a Pāṇḍya sovereign and Indra is ubiquitous. This topos which supposedly originated around middle of the 5th century CE, can be traced to Cilapattikāram XI, 17–30, which celebrates a Pāṇḍya monarch wearing Indra’s garland, capturing the clouds, and breaking the god’s crown. The narrative was later employed in the Tiruviḷaiyāṭaṟpurāṇam (late 13th century) and its Sanskrit rendering, the Hālāsyamāhātmya (14th–15th centuries), where the actions of the Pāṇḍya kings were inserted in the narratives about the divine līlās of Śiva in Madurai. Since the early phase of the dynasty, this mytheme was employed as a tool of political display in the South. After a survey of the motif in the first phase of the imperial documents, the paper will focus on the reemployment of the category of royal violence in the Teṅkāśi dynastic period (14th–18th centuries CE), using the lens of the official copper plates of the late Pāṇḍya chancery and the previous Sanskrit literary production.
Vīrabhadra, the Dreadful Destroyer of Sacrifice
When Śiva is not invited to the great sacrifice organised by Dakṣa, his bride Satī’s father, he emanates from himself the terrible Vīrabhadra, who completely destroys the sacrificial arena. The remote origins of this mythical story, which is extensively narrated especially in the Purāṇas, lie in some myths concerning Rudra, Śiva’s Vedic-Brahmanic precursor. The cult of Vīrabhadra spread throughout South India during the Vijayanagara empire, mainly thanks to the Śivaite sect of the Vīraśaivas. The long-lasting diffusion of his cult is also demonstrated by the wide production of metal plaques depicting this god. A few years ago the art collectors Paola and Giuseppe Berger donated a conspicuous collection of these plaques to the Veneranda Accademia Ambrosiana of Milan; they are currently on display in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. Many of these plaques are possibly attributable to the 18th and 19th centuries and their exact provenance cannot be defined at the present stage of studies, but most of them presumably come from Karnataka. They show an almost constant basic iconography, but also a wide range of different artistic languages. Here we propose a general analysis of this repertoire, and a more detailed description of some of the specimens.